It was the poor boy, who was locked up in one of the rooms of the inn, where he passed his days in motionless contemplation of the picture of his beloved, without speaking a word, scarcely eating, never weeping, hardly opening his lips save to sing this simple, tender verse enclosing a poem of sorrow that I then learned to decipher.
The gloaming of a misty, melancholy autumn day is succeeded by a cold, dark night. For several hours now, the continuous stir of the town seems to have ceased.
Some near, others far, some with grave and measured beat and others with a quick and tremulous vibration, the bells are swinging in their towers, flinging out upon the air their metallic notes which float and mingle, lessen and die away to yield place to a new rain of sounds pouring continually from the deep brazen throats as from a spring of inexhaustible harmonies.
It is said that joy is contagious, but I believe that sadness is much more so. There are melancholy spirits who succeed in eluding the intoxication of delight that our great popular festivals carry in their atmosphere. It is hard to find one who is able to bear unaffected the icy touch of the atmosphere of sorrow, if this comes to seek us in the privacy of our own fireside,--comes in the wearisome, slow vibration of the bell that is like a grieving voice, uttering its tale of troubles at one’s very ear.
I cannot hear the bells, even when they ring out merry peals as for a festival, without having my soul possessed by a sentiment of inexplicable and involuntary sadness. In the great capitals, by good or evil hap, the confused murmur of the multitude which beats on every sense, full of the noisy giddiness of action, ordinarily drowns the clamor of the bells to such a degree as to make one believe it does not exist. To me at least it seems that on All Souls’ Night, the only night of the year when I hear them, the towers of the Madrid
churches, thanks to a miracle, regain their voices, breaking for a few hours only their long silence. Whether it be that my imagination, predisposed to melancholy thoughts, aids in producing this effect, or that the novelty of the sound strikes me the more profoundly; always when I perceive, borne on the wind, the separate notes of this harmony, a strange phenomenon takes place in my senses. I think that I distinguish the different voices of the bells one from another; I think that each of them has its own tone and expresses a special feeling; I think, in fine, that after lending for some time profound attention to the discordant combination of sounds, deep or shrill, dull or silvery, which they breathe forth, I succeed in surprising mysterious words that palpitate upon the air enveloped in its prolonged vibrations.